Alan Turing’s centenary celebrations/conference last couple of days on in San Francisco was a textbook conference. Folks who invented and wrote text books on modern computer science were all there -- Kahan to Knuth, Serf to Wirth, Ken Thompson and many many more. The lectures are webcast and hopefully be available for viewing later on. Friday I was at the conference and listened to all the talks. It was pretty amazing gathering with 32 Turing award winners, talks and panel sessions by many of them. Unfortunately I had to miss Saturday events. Photos from this event are at: http://on.fb.me/LyRqih and http://bit.ly/Tu100p

Turing and other tidbits I learned on Friday.1. It’s estimated that Turing and his team’s effort in decoding German code shortened world war II by at least 6 months, may be up to 2 years.

2. He was a long distance runner. The loneliness of long distance running must have given him ample time to think. He would have liked the ultra running crowd!

3. Raj Reddy is the only Turning award winner of Indian Origin. He has been teaching at CMU longer than I’ve been living. His work on speech recognition, AI are used by systems like siri. He's now working on intelligent system that can analyze complete world information and give instant expertise... Next generation of Watson?

4. Classic turing test for AI: If you can exchange messages with a machine and humans can't distinguish between a computer, you have artificial intelligence. Jim Gray revised the this to: If you can't distinguish the computer's vision, hearing and talking from a human being, you have artificial intelligence.

5. Take away from listening to Fernando, Ken Thompson who worked on MULTICS, Unix was to be daring and use Moore's law as your friend.

-- Fernando said, during MULTICS dev, they enforced a rule. Every developer should pre-announce what they're building!6. Seems like there is lot of interest in creating algorithms and systems to do this. Raj said release of Siri is an important step for humans to have talking automated assistant. Second observation was, recent "intelligent" systems, Deep Blue, Siri, Watson, Google Translator use brute force and not deductive reasoning from the base input. May be that's the way to solve these problems. The observation is rather interesting. This year's Turing award winner, Judea Pearl has advocated statistical approach to AI. I'll revisit this in a later blog.7. Yesterday's how becomes today's what? Going back to personal productivity example, till recently, we wanted TO-DO lists, calendars, instant messages within the phone. Siri has redefined this to a WHAT problem -- you want to keep updated to-do list, keep your appointments and communicate quickly. Finally, the systems folks have to move from how to WHAT. Again, another topic worth thinking and writing more about.

8. Lambda calculus played an important role in computer science development. Turing's universal machine got more acceptance because of its simplicity and was developed from first principles.

9. William Kahn talked about trying to test software to avoid software errors, how you can not guarantee perfect software. But, systems can be designed to anticipate the classes of issues and design for it. I'll revisit this in separate blog..

10. Go back read the original papers -- not rewritten books or papers. Original papers tend to build the ideas from first principles and are usually better written.

On that note, go see the webcasts themselves from ACM site (hopefully, they're available soon). Read papers from Turing... Couple of important ones...

1. On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungs problem.